Getting slapped in the face with a plastic arm to wake up is not as painful as it might look - probably more humiliating than painful really.
Being an actor is such a humiliating experience because you are selling yourself to the public, your face, your personality, and that is humiliating. As you get older, it becomes more humiliating because you've got less to sell.
I think the only thing that really can be done - it would be painful, but less painful than the calamity we're heading toward - is to demand that people be responsible for their private obligations. No more bailouts, no more stimulus, no cash for clunkers.
One of the things about the modern world is that the public and the private - which is not the same as the public and the personal - but the public and the private... it's very, very much harder than it used to be to have things that are private and things that are public.
At equal returns, public investments are generally superior to private investments not only because they are more liquid but also because amidst distress, public markets are more likely than private ones to offer attractive opportunities to average down.
I didn't understand how difficult it would be to transition in the public eye and look back at pre-transition videos - it's sort of humiliating and painful.
In the end, it is because the media are driven by the power and wealth of private individuals that they turn private lives into public spectacles. If every private life is now potentially public property, it is because private property has undermined public responsibility.
The best way to alleviate the obesity "public health" crisis is to remove obesity from the realm of public health. It doesn't belong there. It's difficult to think of anything more private and of less public concern than what we choose to put into our bodies. It only becomes a public matter when we force the public to pay for the consequences of those choices.
There is no more reason to pay for private education than there is to pay for a private swimming pool for those who do not use public facilities.
After too much art that made too much sense, artists are operating blind again. They're more interested in the possible than the probable, the private that speaks publicly rather than the public with no private side at all.
There is no more staunch advocate for taking public dollars and giving them to private schools - private schools that can pick the students they want to teach - than Betsy DeVos.
In a community where public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption things are very different. Here, in an atmosphere of private opulence and public squalor, the private goods have full sway.
Any moral philosophy is exceedingly rare. This of Menu addresses our privacy more than most. It is a more private and familiar, and at the same time, a more public and universal word, than is spoken in parlor or pulpit nowadays.
As public schools deteriorate, the upper-middle class and wealthy send their kids to private ones. As public pools and playgrounds decay, the better-off buy memberships in private tennis and swimming clubs. As public hospitals decline, the well-off pay premium rates for private care.
We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.
Now we live in a time where the public and the private are completely fused and there isn't such a great distinction. We know our private lives are constantly made public. With Facebook and Twitter there isn't such a desire, it feels, to keep things private.